IBM Gets Serious about Linux on z Systems

It has taken the cloud, open source, and mobile for IBM to finally, after more than a decade of Linux on z, for the company to turn it into the agile development machine it should have been all along. Maybe z data centers weren’t ready back then, maybe they aren’t all that ready now, but it is starting to happen.

LinuxONE Rockhopper, Refreshed for Hybrid Cloud Innovation

In March, IBM will make its IBM Open Platform available for the IBM LinuxONE (IOP) portfolio available at no cost. IOP includes a broad set of industry standard Apache-based capabilities for analytics and big data. The components supported include Apache Spark, Apache HBase and more, as well as Apache Hadoop 2.7.1. Continuing its commitment to contributing back to the open source community, IBM has optimized the Open Managed Runtime project (OMR) for LinuxONE. Now IBM innovations in virtual machine technology for new dynamic scripting languages will be brought to enterprise-grade strength.

It doesn’t stop there. IBM has ported the Go programming language to LinuxOne too. Go was developed by Google and is designed for building simple, reliable and efficient software, making it easier for developers to combine the software tools they know with the speed, security and scale offered by LinuxONE. IBM expects to begin contributing code to the Go community this summer.

Back in December IBM brought Apple’s Swift programming to the party, first to the IBM Watson iOS SDK, which gives developers a Swift API to simplify integration with many of the Watson Developer Cloud services, including the Watson Dialog, Language Translation, Natural Language Classifier, Personality Insights, Speech To Text, Text to Speech, Alchemy Language, or Alchemy Vision services – all of which are available today, and can now be integrated with just a few lines of code.

Following Apple’s introduction of Swift as the new language for OS X and iOS application development. IBM began partnering with Apple to bring the power of Swift open source programming to the z. This will be closely tied to Canonical’s Ubuntu port to the z expected this summer.

Also, through new work by SUSE to collaborate on technologies in the OpenStack space, SUSE tools will be employed to manage public, private, and hybrid clouds running on LinuxONE. Open source, OpenStack, open-just-about-everything appears to be the way IBM is pushing the z.

Hoffman didn’t suggest what comes after 2020 but we can probably imagine: Cognitive Computing, Internet of Things, Blockchain. At least those are trends starting to ramp up now.

He does, however, draw a picture of the state of Linux on the mainframe today:

27% of total installed capacity run Linux

Linux core capacity increased 16% from 2Q14 to 2Q15

40% of customers have Linux cores

80% of the top 100 customers (in terms of installed MIPS) run Linux on the mainframe

67% of new accounts run Linux

To DancingDinosaur, this last point about the high percentage of new z accounts running Linux speaks to where the future of the z is heading.

Maybe as telling are the following:

64% of companies participate in Open Source projects

78% of companies run on open source

88% of companies to increase open source contributions in the next 2-3 year

47% to release internal tools & projects as OSS

53% expect to reduce barriers to employee participation in open source

50% report that more than half of their engineers are working on open source projects

66% of companies build software on open source

Remember when open source and Linux first appeared for z, data center managers were shocked at the very concept. It was anti-capitalist at the very least, maybe even socialist or communist. Look at the above percentages; open source has gotten about as mainstream as it gets.

It will be interesting to see how quickly developers move to LinuxONE for their CAMSS projects. IBM hasn’t said anything about the pricing of the refreshed Rockhopper model or about the look and feel of the tools. Until the developers know, DancingDinosaur expects they will continue to work on the familiar x86 tools they are using now.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

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